Monday, September 25, 2017

Counterpunch | Only the great Terry Southern could’ve scripted it: an American
madman standing in front of the nations of this world in all his naked,
toxic, Other-hating Old Glory, for all intents and purposes telling the
assembled dignitaries that yes, women seek his life essence, but he
denies it to them, because of that feeling of emptiness which follows the physical act of love…

…And by the way, I may want to kill twenty-five million people.

You wondered how this sickest of all sick Trump tropes would be
dissected by those scalpel-wits at MSNBC. Surely this would be an
opportunity for them to have some cheap pulpy fun at Trump’s expense?
After all, this is the network that employs Joy Reid, who is so
desperate to red-bait Trump that she insists on pretending that Russia
is still a communist country. Surely they would seize upon Trump’s
genocide threat to lay bare the horror of the entire speech.

Actually, they loved it.

Brian Williams—the man who contorted a Leonard Cohen lyric so he
could rhapsodize about the beauty of American bombs—had two “experts” on
to break down the speech. And how Williams’ voice quavered with
patriotic fervor as he announced them—-we are in the presence of greatness!—-“John Negroponte and Colonel Jack Jacobs.”

Negroponte, of course, is famous for being Our Man in Honduras in the
1980s, a tough job that required a lot of co-ordinating with death
squads and torturers, many of whom spoke limited English. He always
played dumb when called to testify before Congress, but as The National Catholic Register
reported, he “deceptively downplayed human rights violations, and
played a key role in supporting the activities of Battalion 316, a
CIA-backed Honduran-based regional counterinsurgency unit subsequently
found to be among the cruelest of the cruel.”

Oh, in addition to his crimes against humanity, Negroponte also
endorsed Hillary Clinton, who obviously shared his interest in
perpetuating mass suffering among nonwhite, non-loyal Hondurans. And she
trumpeted his endorsement loudly, as she did with Henry Kissinger. Not
that there’s anything tone-deaf about that.

It turns out that old John Negroponte was very impressed with Trump’s
speech—only Benjamin Netanyahu was more girlish in his excitement. But
surely Jack Jacobs, decorated war hero, would call out the insanity of
threatening to commit war crimes in a speech at The United Nations. And
Williams teed it up for him, asking Jacobs how America could start to
“walk back” Trump’s Jack D. Ripper idiocy.

I don’t think we do want to walk it back, said Colonel Jacobs. He
too felt good about the speech. The way it showed our toughness. Our
resolve.

Our bipartisan resolve, he might’ve added, because it turns
out that he too was a Hillary supporter. And wasn’t Hillary the one who
threatened to “obliterate” Iran?

Look, MSNBC, I understand: it’s been a tough week for you.
Hurricanes and earthquakes have occasionally forced you to steal time
and attention from the latest Robert Mueller deposition. But you may
have inadvertently done us a great service: in real time, you helped us
connect the genocidal madness of Donald Trump, via the connections of
two neo-con hacks, directly back to Hillary Clinton. Which is a fancy
way of saying-—heck, we’re all Americans, at the end of the dayTo quote a
great American, “God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural bodily fluids.”